fine whine

Does anybody out there want a free Gmail account? I've got a couple invites left over and nobody wants them. There's a guy on Craigslist selling them for seven bucks and whatnot, but nobody can really say how much business he's really getting.

It would be a pretty easy seven bucks, I have to say.

Anyway, I remember the days that people were trading mp3 and DVD players for these (before I got invited, naturally). Back then they were cool. Now, I can't seem to get rid of mine, and Google just gave me another batch of them.

Seven bucks, though, hmmm...

Right now, it is now. At the moment I'm writing this, it's actually the moment under which this will be filed in the database, though I've attempted to remove much of the time-relevent information from this section of my site. Doing this (writing, not messing with the internal structures of things) once a day instead of seeveral times simplified things considerably.

If only I had stuff to write about every day. I have a mental backlog, of course, of menial and dumb topics with which to fill an empty day's space, but today I don't feel like elaborating on my dislike for Faye Dunaway or automatically flushing urinals. I don't want to dredge up un-digitized writings frmo high school or college, and I don't particularly want to say anything about the still-advancing poison ivy, everlasting scourge of my front yard.

I don't even want / to write a haiku about / summer, or some such nonsense.

I'm watching 28 days later... right now when I wanted to be re-styling the most ancient bits of my site. You know, the ones that show up when you type "www.mikelietz.org" into that address bar up there.

So, yeah, umm, have a nice day.

Sometime along the posting forward and posting backward this last week or so I was able to free up some prime DVD watching time. I spent most of watching television shows, so it was prime time indeed, ha ha ha. This time I focused (inadvertently, really) on the end of two series, Fox's Family guy and the BBC's Black Adder. Though both are comedies, the similarities pretty much end there.

Family guy is both hilarious and misguided. It's misguided in that almost every single episode (perhaps all of them, I cannot be sure without watching them again) included at least one musical number. I'm okay with the occasional musical number, but so many in such a short span of time (I watched the entire third season in under a week) started to wear on me, and eventually even grate. The writing's great and the animation's fantastic, but I'm not so much a fan of showtoons or Busby Berkeley or whoever to really need to see that sort of thing every time I hit fast-forward on the remote.

Yes, fast-forward. The damn theme song's not all that great, and I'm really not a fan of Lois's singing. Moreover, as I have been tired lately, the song's been bouncing around in my head more than I'd like. I could complain about this sort of thing much longer but for the fact that there is an incredibly simple fix -- all the DVD producers needed to do was put a chapter stop in right after the opening titles. They almost always put one in just before the end credits, damnit. I'd wager more people want to skip through the same thirty seconds of tripe than want to find out who did the celebrity voices or key grip or whatnot.

I for one, despite having watched several hundred DVDs and laserdiscs in my life, cannot recall a single time wherein I skipped right to the end credits, TV show or otherwise.

Maybe I'm just being picky. Or a snob. I know the M*A*S*H discs I've watched let me skip "Suicide is painless" every time, though there they didn't let me watch all of the episodes in sequence without two or three button presses between each episodes. What is it going to take to get simple navigation on every DVD? Don't people want people to be able to watch these things?

But watch them I did, and Family guy was friggin' hilarious. The high point, I think, was a couple second throwaway gag taken from Monty Python's Meaning of life, namely the "modern art" tuxedo-ed guy asking about the fish. You'd know it if you saw it, I'd think. This, after all, is a show that takes parody to ludicrous extremes with several minutes to nearly entire episodes devoted to Logan's run or Dukes of Hazzard.

Less laugh-out-loud funny but not much less of a farce is the classic BBC series of Black Adder, with Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnery, Brian Blessed, Tony Robinson and more. The humo(u)r's a lot more focused on this show, with each of the four series done in a different era of Britain's past, from the days of Richard III to the trenches of WWI.

Alas, in this case also the titles were not quite skippable. That said, since this was a BBC series I only sat through the theme music six times, not twenty-some. And it's much catchier, too, and more interesting as well to listen to the differences between the seasons.

They're all at your library, check 'em out. And if you happen to be a DVD producer, put in some better chapter stops. Please.

Just when I thought I was so cool for posting a couple days in advance, something timely happens. Thursday night, sometime after seven o'clock Jessica and I were walking down Northtowne toward Tamarack Circle when we heard a loud crashing noise. I looked forward and saw a black (or really dark blue) Toyota Camry smashing into the first car in a line of four or five, stopping briefly and then continuing on slowly down Northtowne. I made sure to look at the plates as the battered V6 (it was the model after the squarish one but before the most recent tank-styled one) lumbered past. The plates were   DR70BK, but it took me too long to make sure what they were so I didn't get a great look at the people in the car. Jessica says there were three white guys in it but I couldn't tell if there were three or five. I got a minor glance at the front passenger, a white guy with short light colored hair, and a goofy fratboy look on his face. He could be anywhere between twenty two and thirty two, but I have to admit I'm not a good witness.

I recognize my limitations. I realize that I didn't see the Camry actually hit the first car, the older woman's light blue 2001-2002 Ford Focus station wagon. That impact, with her driver-side tail light, I only heard and did not see. The second one, head on with the younger woman's black Honda Civic, I saw. None of this happened at too high of speed (nor do I recall hearing any skidding, despite the dampened street) but by the time the Toyota left there was at least two car lengths between the Focus sitting partway into the Circle and the Honda with the now-bashed-in bumper and grille "H" logo resting on the windshield. Not that that part mattered, as since nobody was hurt the crime scene was not scrutinized, well, at all.

The Camry drove away. Jessica and I stuck around since most of the other cars left, though two of them returned (a guy in another, older Camry and a woman in a white Eclipse convertible) having looked for the perpetrators, but alas, no dice. The squad car eventually arrived (#181, a newer Interceptor) and the policeman (sorry, didn't get his badge number) told us we could get going. I only hope that the guilty are caught, but can't imagine how they wouldn't be, as at least five witnesses got the plates. Then again, there's always the chance that the kids were joyriding (the Camry's the most stolen car, after all) but for that matter I didn't recall see them riding around with surgical gloves.

So, if there's a lesson to be learned there, you're going to need to figure it out yourself. I'll still probably post into the future, but I might start lying about the days when something supposedly happens.

All of my CDs are packed up in boxes still. I plan to build some shelves soon so that I can have all five or seven hundred of them out (I no longer know how many I have) and accessible, but I'm in no real rush. At work I've been using Last.fm, playing bits and pieces of my music collection as well as the occasional recommendation, and I'm pretty happy with it. I created a bogus profile specifically for my playlist. I haven't listened to music logged in under it yet, so it's untainted by other people's tracks. It's all mine.

You see, Last.fm does this interesting thing whereby they stream you the music liked by the people who like what you like. If that sounds too confusing, you can just donate a small sum of money to them and be able to listen to specific people's music, including your own. So I made /codger and threw in the four-hundred songs that sounded appropriate, mostly whole albums at a time. I've had some minor difficulties adding to it while listening under my real account, but that's probably the price I pay for trying to subvert the system. If you wish to do the same, or just to listen to my everyday music mix, give it a spin.

Anyway, two of the artists in my playlist are Cake and Prodigy (or I suppose I should say "The Prodigy"). Years ago, I'd have picked Cake to be my favorite band and Prodigy to be a rather promising artist. In the intervening time Cake's released some two or three albums, and burned out two or three band members, whereas the Prodigy folks did, well, not much at all. I bought Liam's Dirtchamber sessions album, but that was at a time I was particularly susceptible to mix albums.

Oddly enough, by some odd coincidence both groups are soon to be releasing another album. I don't know if I should be excited or not. If I pre-order the new Cake disc I apparently can get a super secret bonus extreme limited edition three track disc, but to do so I need to throw some money at Sony. Thirteen bucks plus shipping, in fact, and it's been a long time since I paid thirteen bucks for a CD.

For that matter, it's been probably since I bought Dirtchamber, and then I think I'd ordered it to get the super secret special digipack edition or something like that. Whatever reason it was, I should've waited since I've seen it many times since used for less than half of what I'd paid, but such is life when one wants to live on the cutting edge of washed-up electronica.

Then again, I do have a birthday approaching. Maybe I could leverage that.

So I have decided to tackle the well-known Opera / Wordpress issue with the post editing page. It seems that Opera 7+ lays out fieldsets differently from IE and Firefox, or rather doesn't lay them out at all. It just throws them in on top of each other, not next to each other as do the other browsers.

So what I did was to wrap each fieldset on the post.php page in a div (bad semantics, but if it works I won't complain) with this CSS:.xxx {
clear: all;
float: left;
margin: 2px;
padding: 0;
}

I removed the categories fieldset as all of my posts are in General, but other fieldsets disappeared, some at random. Resizing the window had some funny effects, but I do not doubt that a more masterful CSS hacker couldn't take this and run with it.

This is what my five minutes of monkeying around gave me: